There are two ways this plays out.
In one version, data centers become the most contested infrastructure in America. Communities spend the next ten years fighting over whether to build at all, projects stay blocked, and the technology that’s supposed to power our future gets held up in zoning hearings.
In the other version, developers and communities figure out how to build something together, and data centers become genuinely valuable anchors for the places they land in.
We are at that fork right now. And the direction we go won’t be decided by capital or technology. It will be decided by whether people on both sides of the table are willing to have a different kind of conversation.
The Objections Are Legitimate
I want to be direct about something.
The concerns communities are raising about data centers are not manufactured. The power draw is real. The water consumption is real. The job creation, relative to the capital being invested, is modest. These are fair questions that deserve honest answers, not talking points.
What I’ve watched happen too often is developers showing up at a planning commission meeting with a project that’s already fully formed. Site selected. Design locked. Financing closed. And then they’re surprised when the community feels like it’s being asked to rubber-stamp something rather than participate in a decision.
By the time a project appears at a zoning hearing, the developer’s flexibility has shrunk dramatically. The hearing becomes theater. Everyone loses.
What Getting It Right Actually Looks Like
The good news is that the technology to do this better already exists. What’s been missing is the civic expectation that development meet a higher standard.
Some operators are already co-locating with waste-to-energy systems, capturing landfill gas or biogas to generate power on-site rather than drawing from the grid. The facility that was straining local infrastructure becomes an anchor for distributed energy production. The community’s waste problem and the developer’s power problem solve each other.
Cities in Scandinavia have been routing server heat into municipal district heating systems for years, warming homes with what most operators simply dissipate. That model is coming here.
Flexible demand management is turning large data centers into grid stabilization assets, absorbing excess renewable generation rather than straining the system at peak load. Closed-loop water recycling creates partnership opportunities with municipalities managing aging infrastructure.
None of this is theoretical. These are operational models in markets that asked for them. The asking is the part most communities haven’t learned to do yet.
The Conversation Has to Happen Earlier
The single most important shift civic leaders can make is moving this conversation upstream.
Communities that show up at a zoning hearing are playing defense. Communities that engage at the site selection stage are playing a completely different game. By then, there’s still real flexibility on design, on community benefit structures, on what the project actually delivers to the people who will live next to it for the next fifty years.
That requires capacity a lot of municipalities don’t currently have. Understanding the technical and regulatory dimensions of data center development, power infrastructure, water systems, building code, environmental permitting, is genuinely complex. Communities shouldn’t have to figure it out alone, under deadline pressure, project by project.
This is part of why I think about Burnham’s role the way I do. We work both sides of this. We understand what developers need to move, and we understand what communities are actually asking for when they push back. Those things are more compatible than most project teams realize.
What This Is Really About
The data centers being planned right now will be part of American communities for fifty years.
The relationships built or broken during development will shape those communities for a generation. The fiber buildout, the grid investment, the long-term tax base are all real contributions. But they need to be structured as genuine community assets, not developer talking points. Community benefit agreements with real teeth. Local hiring commitments. Workforce partnerships with community colleges.
Roughly $64 billion in data center projects are currently blocked. Timelines have tripled in contested markets. The instinct is to call it a permitting problem. But we’ve been here before, and we know what actually moves projects.
Trust has to be built. It can’t be expedited. The teams that understand that are the ones who will be building five years from now.
We are, genuinely, all in this together.
Carson P. Kyhl is Principal at Burnham Nationwide, the nation’s leading permit expediting and building code consulting firm. Burnham works with national developers, retailers, and technology clients across eight major markets.
Next: The Question Nobody Is Asking — What Happens When the Data Center Leaves?
